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OpenStack: A step toward cloud computing standarization

Using cloud computing services requires taking a leap of faith with a particular provider. And the more automated services a provider offers, the greater this leap of faith has to be.

You might ask 'leap of faith ? , why ?' Well because that 'secret sauce' that makes your provider's services so appealing (e.g. fault-tolerance, automated scalability. etc), is of course: secret. This means you can't just walk away and take your application to another cloud computing provider.

If you're an extremist like Richard Stallman , you might even say cloud computing is trap because it operates like this. The OpenStack initiative is aimed at easing these fears of cloud provider lock-in.

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September 30, 2010 | Permalink | Track Back (0)

Stallman rips cloud computing: It's a trap

As much as I admire iconic figures in the software industry for their tenacity and what they've achieved. I can't help but think that sometimes their views don't allow them to see the practical side of things.

Here is Richard Stallman who has done so much for open source software, coming out and declaring that cloud computing is a trap .

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September 30, 2010 | Permalink | Track Back (0)

Windows Azure Dallas - Tapping data in the cloud

A long-long time ago -- Internet time that is or the equivalent of 2 years -- there was a lot of hoopla surrounding the term Mashup . Which is nothing more than an application made up from several data sources available on the web.

The possibilities seemed endless and so came a long series of services. Microsoft unveiled tools like Popfly , soon came the Enterprise Mashup Markup Language , the Open Mashup Alliance and even I got into the foray with Mashup Soft .

The fever has since died down in the Mashup world and what hasn't been canceled or is in a dormant state, is getting little attention. But don't get me wrong, the idea behind Mashups is stilll a brilliant one, creating applications that deliver greater insight by mashing-up data from maps, an organization's sales department, government data related to housing or crime, global weather data, among many other things. This is why the possibilities for Mashups seemed endless, because if there was one abundant thing on the web it was data.

However, I can tell you from first hand experience what's the most difficult part to building an application of this kind: quality data sources. This aspect appears to soon be getting an important push forward with Microsoft's Azure - Dallas project .

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September 21, 2010 | Permalink | Track Back (0)

MapReduce : Learning MapReduce in 5 minutes with actual code

Even though the major buzz around MapReduce has tapered of, it still represents an important technique to understand for all software engineers. And I'm not just saying this because Google relies heavily on it, I'm saying it because it allows vast amounts of data to be processed in parallel.

If you best learn technology by working with code, you may find reading Google's MapReduce paper a little theoretical, where as setting up a popular MapReduce implementation like Hadoop can be somewhat daunting and time consuming.

Don't get me wrong, MapReduce is a dense topic because of its distributed nature, but learning the fundamentals with some actual code doesn't have to take hours or days. You can do it in minutes.

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September 18, 2010 | Permalink | Track Back (0)

Cloud computing - A side by side comparison

Web application deployment has changed substantially throughout the years. Once the domain of niche market players or 'hosting providers' that allowed you to park content on the web, this space has grown considerably, sparking the interest of players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

These larger companies are setting the stage to change not only how you deploy web applications, but also how you design them and how you pay for their presence on the web. All of which has given way to 'platforms' that scale and adapt more easily, than the services offered by the 'hosting providers' of yesteryear.

But what are the benefits of such 'platforms' or 'cloud computing platforms' as they are now called ? In what ways are the offerings made by Google, Microsoft and Amazon in this space different ? This entry contains more details, including an extensive 6 page Reference Card I recently wrote on the topic.

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January 11, 2010 | Permalink | Track Back (0)

Scaling in the 'cloud', a few case scenarios : Memcached & EC2

I've seen a few stories in recent months all having to do with scaling, there's of course the Google I/O conference that covered what can be considered 'proprietary'-'non-available' technology, the Twitter scaling nightmare -- which is backed by Ruby/Rails BTW -- and yet another on how Facebook is buying thousands of servers to support its traffic -- which is backed by PHP of all things -- its no doubt an interesting topic, but what are the real technical options out-there for scaling ? This entry will cover a few case scenarios I've worked on related to scaling, elaborating on the software that makes it all happen.

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July 9, 2008 | Permalink | Track Back (0)

OSGi and server side Java : Implications and how does it actually work

OSGi is slowly but surely moving into Java server-side territory and a few other SOA product lines in the industry. Among the most noted, you will find a few of the earliest Java Application Servers now being tagged 'OSGi compliant' or 'OSGi based', in addition, popular Java frameworks like Spring have also blossomed OSGi integration sub-projects. But what are the actual implications behind OSGi ? And more importantly how can you work with it ? This entry covers an article I recently wrote on the subject which includes a hands-on OSGi example, as well as the potential implications OSGi will have on the overall Java and SOA ecosystem.

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January 7, 2008 | Permalink | Track Back (0)

SOA and Microsoft Oslo

Just when you thought new acronyms were a thing of the past in the SOA world, Microsoft just unveiled its latest undertaking code-named 'Oslo'. Its not a product by itself, but rather a holistic approach to all the numerous parts that will eventually compose the Service Orientated Architecture vision from a Microsoft stand-point.

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November 7, 2007 | Permalink | Track Back (0)

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